The Vietnam War raged and Richard Nixon prepared for the presidency while I listened, as a boy of 11, to a football game that stopped time.

Four decades later, Kevin ("Atomic Cafe") Rafferty has made a movie, "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29," about that astonishing game, the players and how it changed their lives.

You could be tempted to dismiss this film as an obscure documentary of interest only to male Ivy League sports buffs that gives away the ending in its title.

Don't.

Rafferty's story transcends sports to confront politics, society and the drama of human experience. Stars range from Yale quarterback Brian Dowling (the inspiration for B.D. of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury") to Harvard's Tommy Lee Jones, who deadpans that his college roommate, Al Gore, was funny in those days.

In my hometown of Cambridge, Mass., that Saturday, Nov. 23, 1968, I listened in disbelief to the radio that had brought news of the RFK and MLK assassinations, of the war I hoped to avoid and of general 1960s tumult. Across town, Harvard staged a miraculous comeback, scoring 16 points inside the final minute to tie the game.

Hence the film's title, drawn from a famed headline in The Harvard Crimson reporting on the tie that amounted to a victory.

Rafferty eschews the standard approach of interviewing celebrity spectators and splicing in vintage news reports. Instead he focuses tightly on recent interviews of the players, now in their 60s. He juxtaposes clips of the game, which remains so preposterous to this day that viewers still feel the suspense.

The film has a villain, a Yale linebacker who claims credit for injuring opponents. It has 1960s hawks and doves, whose improbable collaboration on the field is a universal theme.

One of the players interviewed is Beaverton native John Cramer, a Sunset High School football star who had never been east of Burns before heading for Harvard. Cramer, now a doctor and manager at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash., recalls playing on "a kind of leftist football team."

Cramer tells me that he and the rest of the Boston Stranglers, as the Harvard defense was known, didn't have a very good game. He did recover a fumble by Yale running back Calvin Hill, who was drafted the next year by the Dallas Cowboys.

"When the first of the two touchdowns happened," during the final minute, Cramer says, "there was this incredible perception that it was going to be inevitable, that the Earth had stopped and there was some force in play."

That force lives on in the players, including Cramer, who had no time to shower after finishing a 26-day, 3,500-mile bicycle ride when Rafferty interviewed him.

Other players speak from their kitchens, living rooms or book-lined law offices. They recall the remote, intellectual Harvard coach who benched the quarterback in favor of an unknown local kid -- Frank Champi -- whose Boston accent was so thick, no one could understand the first play he called.

"I found it very uncomfortable to play sort of a sport and take it all that seriously when people were dying," Champi says.

His teammate, Pat Conway, was showered with body parts at the battle of Khe Sanh, by spit from anti-war protesters upon his return from Vietnam and then by delirious cheers at Harvard Stadium.

Magnificent moments don't necessarily define lives -- many of these players went on to do great things -- but they can animate truths, and that's what Rafferty does with this movie.

Some spectators had given up on Harvard and left the stands before the game's gripping final seconds. For them and for us, this documentary refutes Robin Williams' great line that if you remember the '60s, you weren't there.